Idaho’s State Controller’s Office found itself in that position six years ago when it sought to overhaul all its business operation systems. Scott Smith, the chief deputy controller and project manager of Luma, said they were trying to maintain systems that they were losing technical support for.

Each agency had built their own homegrown system, or had procured their own up until that point. There was a desire to modernize operations statewide and do an audit on return on investment for taxpayers. The project got the name Luma, an attempt for the state to “enlighten, or shine a light on” its existing systems and update them, Smith said.

After a procurement process, the state chose enterprise resource planning software company Infor, and replaced a collection of separate systems that ran payroll, budgets, financial management and human resources with one cloud-based solution. Many of these legacy systems dated back to 1987 and 1988, and were becoming vulnerable to security threats, Smith said.

Reports by the Idaho Capital Sun found that since its rollout last summer, the new system didn’t correctly distribute $100 million in interest payments to state agencies, it double paid more than $32 million in Idaho Department of Health and Welfare payments, and it created payroll issues or delays for state employees. A nonprofit that works with the state said it wasn’t paid for months, and only received payments when they sought attention from state legislators and local media, and upon launch day in July 2023, only about 50% of employees had completed basic training on the system.

In February, Moyle and a bipartisan group of eight legislators asked an independent, nonpartisan state watchdog agency called the Office of Performance Evaluations to look into Luma’s software. And in June, a Legislative Services Audit found system lacked a range of information technology controls for data validation and security.

The performance evaluation report isn’t due until October, but Ryan Langrill, interim director of the OPE, said in August that they were told to make the Luma study its priority.

“Our goal is to identify what went well and what didn’t and to offer recommendations for future large scale IT projects,” Langrill said.

Smith told us that with any large-scale IT project, there’s always going to be difficulties during the first year of implementation. Idaho is the first to do a rollout of this kind, where all business processes went live at once in a multi-cloud environment, he said.

They developed requirements for the system for several years before its rollout last year and spent time in system integration testing with experts from Infor.

“Once you put it into the real world, right? There’s still a lot for you to understand,” Smith said. “And while the system itself can provide you the functionality, there’s still a lot of inherent business processes that need to be adapted to the new system.”

Each agency had to evaluate their own internal processes, Smith said. Large-scale departments like military, transportation and health and human services are going to operate differently than smaller ones like libraries and the historical society. Trying to provide a singular system to support each facet of government is going to come with its challenges, he said.

Human error has also likely played a role in the rollout, Smith said. As employees have to learn the new system and make changes to years-long processes, they’ll have to take time to change, adjust, refine and improve.

Smith said he hopes the Office of Performance Evaluations looks at the Luma project with a “holistic” approach, going back to source selections and analyzing what could have been done better with everything from implementation to the development of requirements for the technology.

“We’ll obviously look at those results and see where we can make improvements, but it can also be used, I hope, as a source document for others…” Smith said. “Every state’s going through a system modernization effort, that they can use to help improve their potential for success in their projects.”